Catalogue of Dreams – devised theatre for the Canberra
Centenary 2013 by Urban Theatre Projects, based in Sydney.
Co-Directors: Rosie Dennis and Alicia Talbot.
Performances at Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre.
Previews: Saturday July 13 and Tuesday July 16, 8:15pm
Opening: Wednesday July 17, 8:15pm
Season: Thursdays – Saturdays July 18-27, 8:15pm
Preview by Frank McKone
June 21
The history of Urban Theatre Projects can be seen at
http://urbantheatre.com.au/about/history/
where
the group’s 30 years of work explains why Centenary Director Robyn
Archer approached Alicia Talbot more than two years ago for a theatre
piece from Sydney, as part of the program of works representing a wide
range of Australian local communities for the celebration of Canberra,
the nation’s capital.
Rosie Dennis tells me that Catalogue of Dreams
is ‘contemporary theatre’, collaborative and ‘devised’ – different from
the standard convention of an audience watching a performance through a
'fourth wall'. The audience in the Courtyard Studio will find
themselves integrated in the acting space as if they are in the Family
Court with the young Canberra people who find themselves in difficult
circumstances there.
Though for many theatre-goers in
Canberra the tradition of this form of theatre – going back to at least
Carol Woodrow’s company Fool’s Gallery in the 1970s – will not be a surprise, the keyword for this production is the Dreams of the title. As a Centenary piece, there are two aspects which make it clearly ‘different’.
First,
instead of showing off something that represents the community where
the theatre company resides, such as we saw in the Northern Territory’s
contribution, Wulamanayuwi and the Seven Pamanui by Jason De
Santis, Talbot and Dennis have worked here for some 12 months with local
performers starting from issues that face young people dealing with
bureaucracy and the law.
The result is a scripted work,
now in solid rehearsal as I write, largely written up by Dennis, which
is entirely appropriate in the Canberra context – raising concerns for
us about the centre of government 100 years on – while also being
relevant to audiences around the country. Anyone who has ever had to
explain again and again to, say, Centrelink officers, to police
officers, to lawyers or in court hearings who they are, what has
happened to them, what they did and why, will appreciate this show.
But rather than this becoming another kind of ‘reality’ show, what Catalogue of Dreams
reveals is the disjunct between the playful dreamlike fantasy world
which is natural to teenagers, still naive and childlike in so many
ways, and the formal situations demanded by the system of laws and rules
of behaviour which constitute the ‘adult’ world. Here is a universal
theme, applicable to any human society as Wulamanayuwi showed us
in the Tiwi Islands. For anyone caught up in fraught circumstances, the
experience is surreal – as it will be for the audience in the Courtyard
space when this drama opens on 17th July.
In
performance, the work is essentially image-driven – not so much in the
form of multi-media presentations but rather through creating images in
the minds of those observing through text and story, voice-over and
devices such as masks. In this sense, it seems to me, this Urban
Theatre project is not so different from the long tradition of street
theatre going back to the commedia dell’arte of centuries ago, with its
combination of humour and absurdity, now in a modern context.
Though personally I’ll be travelling – perhaps following my own fantasies – while Catalogue of Dreams is on stage, I feel disappointed to miss what should be a fascinating and significant production.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Friday 21 June 2013
Friday 14 June 2013
2013: Opal Vapour by Jade Dewi Tyas Tungaal
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 14
A mesmerising, slow, sinuous dance begins as a body lying on a plinth. Covering shrouds are gently removed by a musician who has entered from the audience tinkling tiny bells as if in mourning. But a hand begins to dance in isolation, lit from below, and slowly, the body comes to life, reproduced as a writhing shadow on a screen. It is an awakening.
The figure remains at floor level for a long period, seeming to go through a series of reptile and animal-like incarnations, until finally rising to standing human form, dressing in clothing at first simple in style and then more sophisticated and formal.
This life goes through several stages, including what seems to be a period of mental difficulties back writhing on the floor – perhaps finally attaining a peaceful death.
I am not qualified to judge or analyse the details of the choreography, but found this work interesting in concept, combining the creators’ Indonesian heritage with Western modern dance. For me the slow and steady movement was absorbing, rather in the way that I might look at a large painting and gradually become aware of all its different elements.
The music is Javanese in style – some gamelan, some as if the sounds of dry grass and wind, some sung in haunting notes, some bowed on a stringed instrument, perhaps reminiscent of the Hindu origins of the culture that we saw in much of the dance in the body shapes, hand and eye movements. Both performers were precise and disciplined.
This is an original work, not so much cross-cultural but integrating elements of the Australian and Indonesian cultures to which these Melbourne performers belong. Interesting and worthwhile to see.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
Wednesday 12 June 2013
2013: Phèdre by Jean Racine
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| Catherine McClements - Phèdre |
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| Juli Forsyth - Oenone |
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| Bert LaBonte - Théramène |
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| Edmund Lembke-Hogan - Hippolytus |
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| Abby Earl - Aricia |
Phèdre by Jean Racine (1639-99), trans. Ted Hughes. Bell Shakespeare directed by Peter Evans; designed by Anna Cordingley; composer: Kelly Ryall. Sydney Opera House Playhouse June 6-29, 2013
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12
Peter Evans has created an intense theatre experience of the tragedy of unfortunate misunderstanding and deliberate but understandable intrigue which, in this high drama, leads to deaths – by guilty suicide, pride and self-destructive bravado, and insurmountable mental stress. Though the family concerned is of Ancient Greek royalty, mortals whose forebears are Olympian gods, it is not difficult to relate this story and the psychology to any modern family. For Queen Phèdre this was absolutely her Annus Horribilis. For our Queen Elizabeth this was 1992, just five years before the accidental death of Princess Diana.
For Bell Shakespeare, Evans brings a new style as well as a new interest in plays beyond the Shakespeare canon, this time from France where Racine was the major tragedian of the later 17th Century. The experiment is a thorough success.
Be prepared to be frightened, as the theatre suddenly blacks out and loud alarums sound, at a level and clarity that the best of modern electronic sound systems can produce. Attention is at once fixed and focussed on the spotlit unmoving figures on stage whose words, spoken with precision of imagery and emotion, tell us the story as each character sees it. This is the style some call ‘presentational theatre’ which may well have been how Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed, and was certainly the way the main characters were presented in Ancient Greek tragedies by, say, Sophocles or Euripides.
But Racine did not use the relieving comedy of Macbeth’s porter, nor the change of pace of a singing and dancing chorus as the Greeks had done. His play takes the myth – of King Theseus (Marco Chiappi), his second wife Phèdre (Catherine McClements), her step-son Hippolytus (Edmund Lembke-Hogan) and Theseus’ beautiful young captive Aricia (Abby Earl) – into an ever-deepening vortex of disaster: a black hole indeed for the King who was so famous for having succeeded in destroying the Minotaur with the help of Phèdre’s sister Ariadne, who provided the thread by which he was guided back to safety out of the labyrinth.
Racine’s ‘chorus’ consists of just four ordinary mortals – Oenone, Phèdre’s nurse (Julie Forsyth); Théramène, Hippolytus’ adviser (Bert LaBonte); and two messengers Ismène (Olivia Monticciolo) and Panope (Caroline Lee). Each has an essential role in this drama as commentator, analyst and critical adviser, and Evans’ direction nicely judges the fine points of the relationships of each in the status positions they hold.
The result is that, in what is essentially story-telling with minimum action, relying almost entirely on quality of voice and spoken expression, every actor needs equal skills – and every actor comes up to the mark.
Yet it has to be said that Catherine McClements, Julie Forsyth and Bert LaBonte stood out for me, perhaps because their parts were given more emotional qualities in Ted Hughes’ script.
Hippolytus’ pride in self-restraint compared with his father’s womanising and monster-killing seems to soften his character, making him more hesitant in revealing his love for Aricia until the situation forces him into action, and making it surprising when Théramène describes how, reckless and without restraint, Hippolytus faces up to the monster created by Neptune which kills him – as Theseus had asked Neptune to do. Hughes’ modern poetic language – almost pentameter in form – I think made it more difficult for Lembke-Hogan to establish the strength of aggression which comes through Racine’s basically four-beat couplet lines in French.
A nice example is when Hippolytus exclaims, in response to Phèdre’s revelation of her love for him:
Dieux! qu’est-ce que j’entends? Madame, oubliez-vous
Que Thésée est mon père, et qu’il est votre époux?
For the other characters Hughes’ English heightens the poetic to good effect, and in the end, after LaBonte’s wonderful dramatic telling of how Hipploytus died and of Aricia’s mourning for her true love, we feel all the sympathy we should for the young couple, and satisfied that Theseus at last recognises his mistakes and gives Aricia her due.
The whole evening, in its almost monumental set yet with characters in modern dress, is fascinating for the linkage created beween the ancient and mythical, the Renaissance and Romantic, and the modern psychological life. An intense experience, not to be missed – or easily forgotten.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
2013: The Maids by Jean Genet
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| Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert All photos by Lisa Tomasetti |
Reviewed by Frank McKone
June 12
Watching The Maids is terrifying enough. Daring to write a review ....
But, like Solange, in the end I have to follow through.
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| Isabelle Huppert as Solange, Cate Blanchett as Claire in rehearsal |
It
would be easy to say the performances of Cate Blanchett, Isabelle
Huppert and Elizabeth Debicki go without saying. But that would only be
because their extraordinary command of their voices seemed to come so
easily. It takes a little while to catch the details in Huppert’s
French-accented English, but the new translation leaves no doubt about
Solange’s meaning.
Huppert creates a delightful, at times almost whimsical character, and therefore all the more tragic in the end. Blanchett’s Claire was exquisite – a character as demanding of her sister as the Mistress is of Claire. I could say these two were as I expected, considering the last performance I saw by Blanchett in Uncle Vanya and Huppert’s films over the years, but Debicki’s Mistress was an equal to her more experienced colleagues’ quality. The point made – that Claire and Mistress were parallel personalities in different universes – was beautifully, even magically, reinforced in the similarities in movement, voice, physical likeness and moody energy of these two actrices. For visual and emotional display, the ripping off their stands of the huge array of dresses and furs in an enormous flurry of frustration was a great example. |
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| Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress |
When Claire declared that she was exhausted!, there was laughter in recognition – even in sympathy. But by the time the Mistress had taken us through her wild destructive phase, and Claire demanded her tea of Solange – the tea laced with Nembutal meant for the Mistress whose role Claire had now taken on for real, no longer as a game – we found ourselves equally exhausted. Not laughing, just applauding.
There is much more than the acting to applaud in this production. There is the taking of new risks: in bringing a play of the immediate post-war 1940s to a modern Australian audience, and in the originality of the use of live camera and amplified voice.
The latter was a highly successful device (in contrast to many multimedia failures I have witnessed in other shows). Here the screen above the action brings the details of facial expression, of objects of significance, and oddly humorous angles which enhance and often enlighten – including for those of us, like me, squeezed by massive bookings months ago into the Circle. The scenes in the almost off-stage bathroom became intriguing with directly observed glimpses of private behaviour selectively showing in wide shot or close-up at the same time. Our perception – both of what we were literally seeing and what was really going on – became part of the ‘game’. Here was a technical device being used to elucidate the concept of different universes in parallel.
Technology, which was not available or probably even thought of by Genet in 1947, has today brought us to the understanding of ideas like ‘quantum leap’ in physics and how there may be copies or versions of ourselves existing in different universes at the same time, but never accessible from one to another.
This is, for me at least, what brought this play into the modern era. In Genet’s day, and in Europe especially, the basically feudal tradition of servants as trusted retainers, almost family of the autocratic rich, was still close enough for The Maids to be immediately relevant (and why I wrote actrices rather than ‘actressess’). Even decades later, friends of mine were employed by ultra-rich Europeans as chef and housekeeper. They came back disgusted after a year, with stories like being sent to Harrods to pick up up a dress, worth only £10,000, or on Majorca (or maybe Capri) having to prepare banquets daily which were hardly touched, but then not being allowed to pass perfectly good food on to local poverty stricken villagers. It must be thrown away, they were ordered.
Perhaps the final straw for this couple was when a ‘radical’ daughter, of a similar age to them, visited the family. The daughter talked to the couple on an equal basis, but was then instructed by her parents not to talk to the servants, or she would be banished. What she did, I don’t know, but my friends came back to our parallel universe in Australia.
But, of course, Genet’s maids had nowhere else to go, no other employment (except, one supposes, in another placement just as bad as the last) – in other words no freedom from their low position in the status power game. Maybe, a lesson might be learnt by a certain Australian mining family whose Mistress has suggested paying workers $2 a day, and whose children (let alone any maids we do not get to hear about) are struggling to keep up their position.
But that kind of family’s story is perhaps more relevant in my following review of another French play – Racine’s Phèdre, which I saw in the same extraordinary day in Sydney.
It may not be easy, considering the bookings, but if you can get to see The Maids the trip will be well worth the effort.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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| Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert (Solange) in performance |
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| Isabelle Huppert and Cate Blanchett |
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| Elizabeth Debicki as Mistress |
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| The Maids set in performance (upstage bathroom blacked out at this point), bird's-eye view on screen showing Cate Blanchett (Claire) and Isabelle Huppert as Solange wearing rubber gloves |
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| Solange (Isabelle Huppert) watches from outside the apartment (shown on screen) as Claire (Cate Blanchett) is left holding the poisoned tea that Mistress has refused to drink |
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